by Dana DiFilippo, New Jersey Monitor
The family of a Paterson man gunned down by police after he called them for help has filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against the city.
Najee Seabrooks, 31, was in a mental crisis on March 3, 2023, when he barricaded himself in his brother’s bathroom and called 911 for help because he thought people were trying to kill him. A five-hour standoff ensued, and officers ended the impasse by shooting him as he exited the bathroom.
Seabrooks’ death was the eighth at Paterson police officers’ hands since 2019, making the department the deadliest statewide with a “historic and well-documented pattern and practice of acquiescing in its officers’ excessive use of force,” the lawsuit states. The state attorney general’s office took over the department three weeks after Seabrooks was killed.
“Suffering from a mental health episode is not a crime, and asking for help during a mental health episode should not lead to death,” attorney Raymond M. Brown wrote. “Defendants’ misconduct caused Mr. Seabrooks to fear that he would be killed by the very police he called for assistance, and he was right.”
Seabrooks’ cousin, Nicole Ricketts, and his mother, Melissa Carter, filed the lawsuit Monday, naming as defendants the city, public safety director Jerry Speziale, and Officers Johnbek Sagdic, Anzore Tsay, Jose Hernandez, Hector Mendez, Qiao Lin, and Mario Vdovjak.
It accuses the men of excessive force, assault and battery, negligence, and state-created danger.
A spokesman for the attorney general’s office declined to comment on the lawsuit.
At the time of his death, Seabrooks worked as an interventionist with the Paterson Healing Collective, a group that responds to such calls to defuse tensions and connect people in crisis with care.
Besides calling police that day, he also called friends at the collective for help. But police refused their assistance even though they were on the scene, barred them from the apartment, told them to quit communicating with Seabrooks, and deployed emergency response officers armed with riot gear, tasers, pepper spray, and high-powered firearms, the lawsuit says.
Those officers then flouted de-escalation strategies to calm the situation, including avoiding a direct confrontation by physically distancing themselves from Seabrooks, slowing down the situation so the passage of time could naturally de-escalate things, avoiding threatening speech and actions, and using family, friends, and trained mental health workers to defuse tensions, according to the complaint.\
The officers removed his family from the apartment, trapped him in the bathroom, heckled him to come out, fired 15 sponge-tipped projectiles at him, and tried to break down the door with a battering ram, the lawsuit states.
When Seabrooks peeked out of the bathroom and saw the police’s show of force, he yelled: “That’s how you coming?”
Even after Seabrooks began cutting himself with a kitchen knife, officers noted he would likely pass out from blood loss — but still stood with guns drawn, pressuring him to surrender, the lawsuit says.
“The PPD officers’ gross deviation from accepted de-escalation principles had tragic but foreseeable consequences,” Brown wrote. “Mr. Seabrooks posed no danger to anyone and was not suspected of any crime. Instead, he was clearly a man in need of mental health assistance.”